This forum seems to be almost entirely about sport, but the title does mention "hobbies and interests" as well, so here's a thread about my cider-making from my own apples, with a Flickr album to which I will add more photos as the season preceeds. I've just started picking, and all the apples will be stored to continue ripening and turning their starch into sugar until October, when they will all have been picked, and I start making cider from them.
I've got nine trees, three of which were only planted in 2014, so aren't bearing full crops yet, but the others, planted in 2008 and 2011, and one old full-size tree which I inherited with the house in 1978, are doing, and this year looks like a heavy harvest. My varieties: 'James Grieve' (the old tree); 'Brownlees' Russet'; 'Cottenham Seedling'; 'Isaac Newton'*; 'Egremont Russet'; 'Bramley's Seedling'; 'Ribston Pippin'; 'Tom Putt'; and 'Dabinett'.
*'Isaac Newton' is the variety involved in the famous anecdote about Sir Isaac Newton seeing an apple fall from a tree and starting a train of thought that eventually led to his theory of universal gravitation. That tree was in the grounds of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, his mother's home where he was staying to avoid the plague in London, and it still survives. The variety, a cooker, is not the greatest apple around, but I just had to have a variety so important historically.
Flickr album.
